CMS are often categorized by the use-cases they cover, usually grouped by "complexity". So we see a lot of CMS taxonomies that bucket products into "Enterprise/Small Business" or "Simple/Medium/Complex".

Here's a typical taxonomy takes both complexity and the Product vs Platform axis into account.

Getting back into Drupal work after a long hiatus, I had an epiphany about how developers choose CMS (or maybe more generally, how makers choose tools).

You know that wonderful moment when you're trying to learn how to do something new with Drupal, and you learn that the feature in question has been implemented in a particulary beautiful way? With enough complexity to handle 99% of the edge cases and provide maximal extensibility? And that happens again and again, and that's why you end up falling in love and refusing to work with other tools?

Many other people have the opposite reaction, retreating in disgust because things are too complicated, and too much work is required just to do something simple that you could roll out in Wordpress with your eyes closed.

I'm trying very hard to avoid making a value judgement here. Simple is good too. Good complexity can also come from combining multiple simple systems, sometimes with more freedom than you can get from a single complex system.

But I wonder if we choose the tools that fit our brains more often than we choose the tools that fit our use cases. I wonder if the decision to make Drupal a relatively-complex, but elegantly crafted CMS is the reason why Drupal has a community of outstanding and thoughtful developers and not the other way around as is commonly supposed?